Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki has gathered a throng of designers including Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma and Riken Yamamoto to oppose the design of Zaha Hadid's 2020 Olympic Stadium in Tokyo.
Maki, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1993, has organised a symposium where Japanese architects will protest against the scale of the proposed 80,000-seat stadium, which is set to become the main sporting venue for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games.
— Dezeen
12 Comments
Lol! Come on guys! What's the matter? Upset because they chose a woman architect over a man! Get over yourselfs already.
from Suo Fujimoto:
"I hope that this protest is successful in shrinking the design to fit the context," he told the magazine. "I'm not fighting Zaha. The competition for the stadium was very rigorous and we can't overturn everything. But the design could be better."
Lol, Zaha is such a strong woman. She grew up in a wealthy family, had everything handed to her, and now designs buildings for billionaires. She is only capable of designing a building when someone has too much money to throw around.
. The judging panel included Tadao Ando, who commented: "The entry's dynamic and futuristic design embodies the messages Japan would like to convey to the rest of the world."
Unbelievable that Japan will spend billions on the Olympics while Fukushima remains an ongoing global catastrophe that only shows signs of getting worse.
At best it will not get built, at worst it will be a white elephant after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are cancelled due to radioactivity.
I'd have loved it if Tadao Ando competed and won this competition.. Can you imagine his stadium of this size in concrete? xD
When was the last time American architects got together and protested an architectural project by a well known architect for architectural reasons?
Upon first sight I was wondering how long it would take to see some push back from the Japanese architecture community. There isn't one redeeming quality I could find with the Zaha Hadid design, it's nothing more than an amorphous blob of super techno-futuristic cliches, it is about as representative of Japan as a burrito. I also question the impact the scale something of this scale would have on Yoyogi Park, which is also home to Tange's Olympic Arena, which represented a resurgent Japan in 1964 to a T. Ando's statement regarding this design is troubling to say the least. Fukushima is another issue, and I do agree that the overall planning for the 2020 games should be sensitive to the 3/11/11 disaster in its entirety, Fukushima is another story...
its not an architecture protest.
i went to the symposium on friday and saw maki talk in a crowded standing room only hall. A former professor was also on the panel, and they were talking about history and safety and the importance of civil society. They never once mentioned any of the bullshit remarks about zaha and the form that prop up in this site without fail. It isn't about that. or at least they aren't making it so. Mostly the controversy is about the scale, which is crazy, and the opacity of the competition, which they convincingly argued against.
There is room for improvement urbanistically. The question is whether Zaha's office will take the opportunity when they switch to design development. It seems possible that she will not have that much input actually, which is something i am more curious about.
It's surprising to hear objection to Zaha's stadium. Japan, with the exception of Germany, seems to have embraced the modernist aesthetic for their cities, which understandably, needed to be re-build entirely. But with their high-tech identity, it's surprising. If it's really all about scale, well, that's just the nature of the beast when it comes to Olympic stadiums. For better or for worse, they tend not to be knit in the urban fabric, so sculptural objects pretty much the name of the game, and when it comes to beautiful high-tech looking objects, you can't get much better than Zaha.
Zaha is on the fast track to become the most over-rated architect since Gehry.
She a female and foreigner at the same time knows nothing about our culture, our language, our food, and history. She knows nothing about the Japanese sensitivity to color, material, and space. Foreign Architects destroy our urban fabric and harmony with these atrocious designs! This project belongs to us, we need to unite and protest this project!
This is precisely what every one of these prejudiced old school doosh-bags who created this gathering is thinking while supposedly only protesting "the scale" of the project!
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